That was before the invasion. Now there was just one gladiator-class carrier and six venture-class cruisers. Hoff worried his lower lip, the skin around his gray eyes tensing. Shadowy, half-remembered memories of death and unspeakable destruction across countless worlds drifted through his mind’s eye on a sea of blood. The mind was a capricious warden, at times holding captive all of the worst memories, while at others, letting them all out in a dire free-for-all. Hoff remembered. . . .
Ten years ago, the Sythians had come boiling into the Adventa Galaxy from the neighboring Getties Cluster and stormed across the galaxy, wiping out everything in just nine months. Trillions of people had died in that war. Humanity had been woefully unprepared.
The Sythians had come with almost two thousand cloaked warships filled with millions of slave soldiers—vicious, two-meter high monsters called Gors. Even the foot soldiers were cloaked, and they’d always had the element of surprise—always ripped our throats out before we could scream, Hoff thought with a grimace.
The war had come to be known as The Invisible War, and the Gors—with their glossy black armor and skull-like helmets—had been the ugly face of that war. They crewed the Sythians’ warships, piloted their fighters, drove their spider tanks, and did all the Sythians’ dirty work. They’d done such a fantastic job of keeping their Sythian masters out of harm’s way that for almost a decade, no one even knew the Sythians existed. Even after meeting one of them, Hoff had continued to believe that the Gors were the real enemy.
That suspicion had almost cost humanity everything they had left.
Near the end of the war, a few million wealthy and important people, including Supreme Overlord Altarian Dominic, had managed to flee to Dark Space. Once a place of exile for the Imperium’s worst criminals, it was now the last refuge of humanity. The sector was surrounded by black holes and had just one safe way in or out, which was hidden by a sensor-disrupting nebula. No one except for a few high-ranking officers had even known where it was. Officially, Dark Space didn’t exist, and for ten long years, that had been enough to keep it safe.
During that time, Hoff had been almost 1,000 light years away, having been cut off from the retreat. He’d used the remnants of his Fifth Fleet to rescue survivors from the war and bring them to his Enclave. Much later, he’d found out about the survivors hiding in Dark Space, and he’d learned that the sector had suffered a criminal revolt. The criminals had come to him with a stolen warship—none other than the overlord’s flagship, the Valiant herself—and Hoff had chased them back to Dark Space, thinking he would defeat the rebellion with just one captured Sythian cruiser and his own flagship, the Tauron. That plan would have worked flawlessly, too, were it not for the fact that he’d unwittingly brought a Sythian tracking device with him.
“Hangar bay controllers have a grav lock on the Intrepid,” Lieutenant Hanz said from the comm station, interrupting Hoff’s reverie.
Hoff acknowledged that with a nod. “Bring them in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Waiting on board that cruiser was Hoff’s XO, Master Commander Lenon Donali. He’d missed a lot in the week that he’d been away. When they’d parted ways, Donali had been leaving to take the alien tracking device they’d found with him, hoping to lead the Sythians away from Dark Space. Before that tracking device had been found, Hoff had suspected that the Gors had betrayed them. In retaliation for that, he’d broken the alliance and had thousands of them slaughtered at a human-run Gor training facility on Ritan. Not long after that they’d found the alien tracking device and realized that the Gors had been innocent all along, but by then it had been too late. Thanks to the tracking device, the Sythians knew where Dark Space was, and they had ignored Commander Donali’s diversion to rather follow Hoff into Dark Space with an entire fleet.
Suddenly it had no longer mattered whether the legitimate government or a gang of criminals would be in control of the sector. There was no way that a dozen human starships were going to fight off several hundred Sythian ones. There wasn’t going to be a Dark Space.
Yet when all had seemed lost, Hoff had found a way to detect the Sythians’ cloaked command ship. . . .
And destroy it.
His eyes turned from the approaching Intrepid to the drifting ruins of the Sythians’ thirty-kilometer-long behemoth-class cruiser. The red eye of the Firean System’s sun glinted brightly off the distant halves of the giant alien warship. The dark speck beside it was what was left of Hoff’s flagship, the Tauron. He’d crashed his kilometer-long battleship into the Sythians’ command cruiser, slicing it in half before they could raise their shields. With that killing blow, the Gors had shown their true colors—
And stopped fighting.
With the command ship disabled, the Gors were no longer afraid of what their Sythian masters would do to them if they disobeyed, and like that, the battle was over.
Hiding behind the cloaking shields of a captured Sythian warship, Hoff’s men snuck aboard the Valiant and took it back from the criminal insurrectionists. The remainder of the outlaw fleet surrendered, and the Gors agreed to maintain the alliance in exchange for mutual asylum in Dark Space.
The legitimate government was still shattered, however. As the last surviving admiral from the ISSF, Hoff was the closest thing they had to a legitimate leader, and as such, he had assumed the title of supreme overlord. His first act as overlord had been to offer a onetime, unconditional pardon for all of the criminals in Dark Space if they would agree to work with the fleet defending the sector. Most of them had welcomed that opportunity, though whether they would actually mend their ways remained to be seen.
For the first time in a long time it seemed like humanity had a chance. It seemed like they were finally safe.
But things are not always what they seem. Hoff frowned as the Intrepid disappeared in the shadow of the Valiant. The Sythians had invaded the Adventa Galaxy with seven fleets. Just less than a whole fleet had been destroyed during the war, and the Gors had surrendered with one recently, leaving the Sythians with the equivalent of five full fleets and six surviving command cruisers. He estimated that left them with over a thousand capital-class vessels—more than enough for them to return and get their revenge. Dark Space had been a wonderful safe haven when the Sythians didn’t know where it was, but now that they did, it was a death trap. Humanity was holed up in a sector with just one way in or out. They were outnumbered and backed into a corner.
“Admiral,” Lieutenant Hanz said from the comm station.
Hoff looked over at the young man. “Yes?”
“The Intrepid has successfully docked, sir, and Master Commander Donali is already aboard.”
Hoff nodded. “Good. I’ll be in the operations center if anyone needs me. Deck Commander Akra—” Hoff waited for her to look up from the helm. Her pale blue eyes contrasted eerily with her honey brown complexion.
“Yes, sir?” she asked.
“You’re the acting CO. I’ll be back at 1730 hours.”
“Yes, sir,” Akra replied.
With that, Hoff stalked down the gangway to the entrance of the bridge. Heads turned, the crew watching with frowns and curious eyes as he left. The doors swished open and then shut behind him. No doubt his crew was wondering what he was going to discuss with Commander Donali, if it were important, and whether or not it affected them.
Hoff strode up to the bank of lift tubes outside the bridge and slapped the call button. He heard a quiet shuffling of feet and turned to see that two of the four sentinels standing guard at the entrance of the bridge had peeled away from the doors and were now flanking him at a discreet distance. Hoff nodded to them. Major Rekan, the ranking officer of the two, nodded back.
Turning away, he waited for the lift tubes with a frown. Bodyguards. A necessary evil these days. He thought back to a time when he could walk around his flagship without fearing for his life. It felt like forever ago. Those days were long gone, and they weren’t likely to return.
One of the lift
s opened, and Hoff stepped inside followed by his guards. He selected the deck marked OP. The operations center was one of 12 decks inside the Valiant’s bridge tower, which in turn sat on top of another 142 decks. The warship over half a klick high—so big that it had to have its own gravlev train system just so that people could get from one end to the other in a timely fashion.
It was like a city in space, and it required a skeleton crew of over 10,000 officers just to keep it running properly. Unfortunately, the criminal revolt had wiped out the original crew of the Valiant—more than 50,000 officers, and Hoff had had to strip crews from stations and warships all over Dark Space just to get half the people he needed. To fill the rest of the ship’s skeleton crew he’d pulled newly-recruited criminals from the outlaw fleet, and he’d even allowed more than a thousand Gors to come aboard as navy sentinels and ISF (Imperial Security Forces) in training.
Hence the bodyguards. Between the Gors and the ex-cons, Hoff had to watch his back wherever he went. The irony was, though, he was more worried about the criminals than the Gors. The Gors had surrendered when they could have won, but the criminals had only done so when their backs were to the wall. That was a big part of why Hoff had agreed to have the Gors come aboard. Besides the fact that they were unparalleled soldiers and better suited to be sentinels than any human, they were the one thing that might keep the ex-cons in line. You’d have to be a stim-baked skriff to mutiny against a ship full of Gors.
The monsters were everywhere, their heads scraping the ceiling in their glossy black armor, the glowing red optics in their helmets seeming to follow Hoff with malicious intent. Despite his rationalizations that the ex-cons were more likely to stab him in the back than the Gors, those aliens still haunted his dreams, leaving him with dark circles under his eyes, and a perpetual sense of impending doom.
This is my punishment for exterminating them at Ritan. To Hoff’s amazement, the Gors had decided to forgive that atrocity and call it even for the trillions of humans they’d killed in the war. Hoff doubted the alien soldiers were as forgiving as they seemed, but so far none of them had tried to rip his throat out. . . . He considered that a good sign.
A golden rain of light streaked by the transpiranium sides of the lift tube as it fell past the lower decks. Hoff forced himself to stop worrying about internal threats and rather focus on what they were going to do now about the looming external threat of another invasion.
The lift tube stopped and the doors slid open. Hoff strode out and around a curving corridor with a wall of real viewports. His gaze wandered to the stars, taking in the bright red orb of the Firean System’s sun, and the frigid blue-white ice ball of Firea herself—the Gors home away from home. They liked the cold, the darkness, the dangerous predators and challenging prey. Gors were hunters at heart, which was ironic considering that now they’d chosen to join the hunted.
Hoff reached the broad double doors of the carrier’s operations center. He stepped up to the doors and waved his wrist over the identichip scanner to provide his credentials. The doors slid open with a swish and Hoff saw his XO already seated at the long rectangular table beyond. Donali rose and offered a brisk salute.
“Admiral,” he said.
“At ease, Commander. I’m glad to see you’re still in one piece.”
“I could say the same about you, sir.”
Hoff offered a tight smile and moved to the head of the glossy black table. His guards had taken up positions outside the doors, leaving them to speak in private. Pulling out his chair on the articulated arm which attached it to the deck, Hoff sat down and folded his hands on the table, taking a moment to eye his XO. Lenon Donali was a middle-aged man of about 40, though middle age was a misnomer since the average human life expectancy with good medical care was around 140 years. Nevertheless, Donali’s face was lined and his dark hair was receding noticeably at the temples. The man’s most striking feature was his artificial eye which glowed red like a Gor’s. Donali could have had a new eye grown to replace the one he’d lost, but cybernetics were far cheaper.
“Did Captain Caldin fill you in on anything that’s happened?”
Donali shook his head. “She didn’t want to speak with me. Said she wasn’t going to tell me anything until I had a full body scan. I have the feeling she doesn’t trust me.”
“I see. And why would that be, Commander?”
Donali shrugged. “She said that I could have been captured and released in the time I was gone, and she’d already been caught by that trick once. She mentioned Captain Adram. I assume from what she said that he . . .”
“He was a Sythian agent, yes.”
“Was he the source of the signal radiation we detected?”
“No. As far as I can tell, Kaon’s implant called home before Adram could give us away, but it does seem that no matter what we did we were going to give Dark Space away.”
“We never should have come.”
“Perhaps, but it’s too late now.” Hoff’s brow furrowed, and he pursed his lips. “So, are you?”
“Am I what, sir?”
“A Sythian agent.”
“Not that I know of, but would I know if I were?”
Hoff smiled. “I’m not sure how to answer that. Would you be willing to submit to a body scan?”
“I already have.”
“And? Clean I suspect.”
“Yes, but since we know that Sythians have cloaking implants . . .”
“You’re afraid that you might have one.”
“I don’t know how we could find it if I did. Perhaps you could find some way to test me yourself. . . . Tell me some particularly juicy bit of classified information and wait to see if you detect any signal radiation leaking from me.”
Hoff laughed and gave a tight smile. “Relax, Donali. We’ll have our medics run a few more tests on you to be sure, but something tells me that if you were a Sythian agent, you wouldn’t be discussing the possibility of that with me, much less giving me ideas about how I might discover you. Now, tell me what you found out about Kaon’s implant.”
“It was some type of Lifelink, sir. It stores the host’s memories and an eidetic map of their brain. I can only assume it serves the same purpose as our own Lifelinks. Add to that the fact that Kaon was a clone and it becomes even more obvious.”
“So you think the Sythians have been doing the same thing as immortal humans—copying themselves to cloned bodies in order to live forever.” Immortals were mythological beings to most people. They’d been in hiding for so long that only a few even knew of their existence, and Hoff could count those few on one hand. Hoff and Donali knew better because they were immortals, or at least Donali was. Hoff’s wife had recently convinced him to deactivate his Lifelink and live a normal life.
Donali nodded and his artificial eye winked in tandem with his real one. “The question is, is that specific type of immortality a natural progression for any sentient race which becomes sufficiently advanced, or is it an idea which the Sythians stole from us?”
“I wish I didn’t have the answer to that question, but I do.”
Donali cocked his head to one side, and his real eye narrowed thoughtfully. “You discovered something?”
“More than one something.”
“I’m listening.”
Hoff took a deep breath. “They didn’t steal the idea from us, Donali. They are us. And we are them.”
Donali slowly shook his head. “What? You’re saying I’m a Sythian?”
“Not quite. Humans are their evolutionary ancestors. Origin, the lost world where humanity supposedly began, isn’t in the Adventa Galaxy, Donali. It’s in the Getties Cluster, and its real name is Sythia.”
Donali’s jaw dropped and his real eye grew wide and round. “That’s not possible. You’re making that up.”
“I wish I were. We’re not fighting aliens at all. We’re fighting a more evolved version of the human race. A genetic experiment in longevity.” Donali’s mouth began moving, but no words cam
e out. Hoff went on, “That’s not all. Our resident traitor, Captain Adram, was implanted with a cloaked Lifelink implant like the one we discovered in Kaon’s brain. He was, for all intents and purposes, another iteration of Kaon himself. He revealed the Enclave to the Sythians, Donali, meaning Dark Space is the last surviving refuge of humanity, and now that the Sythians know where it is, time is running out. We are facing extinction.”
Donali clamped his mouth shut and pursed his lips. After taking a long moment to process that his head jerked suddenly into a nod, as if he’d just decided something. “There is one way out, sir.”
Hoff’s eyebrows elevated slowly. “Evacuate?”
“No. Get help.”
“There is no help, Donali. We’re all alone. We’ve already recruited the Gors and the ex-cons in this sector, but it won’t be enough. Before he died, Adram told me that the Sythians are making slaves out of us now. In all likelihood when they return we’ll see the refugees from the Enclave, all of them turned into Sythian slaves like Adram. We’re badly outnumbered, and what’s stopping the Sythians from sending reinforcements from the Getties? Adram told me there are quintillions of them, Donali. What they sent to conquer us was probably just meant to test the waters. By a happy coincidence it was enough to wipe us out.”
Donali sighed. “It does look grim, but we aren’t alone. You’re forgetting Avilon.”
“The Immortals?” Hoff sat back in his chair and considered it.
“Why not? There are trillions of them, too. You said it yourself. And their technology is more advanced than even the Sythians’.”
“I haven’t been to Avilon in over 30,000 years. They would execute me if I went back.”
“Would they even remember you?”
“Yes. Besides, what makes you think they would help us now, after they stayed out of the entire war? If they’d wanted to help, don’t you think they would have helped when they could have saved trillions of us with their intervention rather than just the few million survivors hiding out here? No, in all likelihood they thought it was justice that the Sythians wiped us out—justice for the war we started which drove them into hiding.”
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